Converting Railway Modelling Gauges and Scales to other hobbies.

This page is the starting point for drilling down into the various sizes of railway models to find exactly what you're looking for.

You'll find section description pages for each main railway model scale, and under each of those is a list of pages by country, where models in that gauge or scale are for sale online, in auction, or for immediate purchase.

In The LRL Depot Now

Rail Models

For those not involved in the Railway Modelling hobby, the variations of scale can be confusing. This is not helped when railway modellers switch between referring to scale and gauge.

At its simplest the difference relates as scale being the same as in any other modelling hobby – particularly regarding buildings, people and non-railway vehicles. Gauge refers to the track-gauge (the distance between the rails on the track.

Even here though, there are differences between countries as evidenced by the N-gauge series of models, which in the USA and in Europe translate as 1:160 model scale, but in the UK are judged as 1:148 scale.

Hopefully the following scales list will help to show where the different railway model sizes fit with the other model hobbies products. The list is not definitive, as it is intended to mainly be of use to wargames, and thus only covers the scales commonly used by them.